


To See With Eyes Unclouded

by fourofhearts



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 03:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14299383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourofhearts/pseuds/fourofhearts
Summary: Ned's spent six moons in King's Landing. He returns to Winterfell with a new perspective on his wife.





	To See With Eyes Unclouded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snacky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snacky/gifts).



> Title from "Princess Mononoke," a Studio Ghibli film.

Ned’s six moons in King’s Landing warrants a feast upon his return, Catelyn has decided.

 

He’s exhausted after the travel and would much rather spend the evening nestled in the couch in his solar, drinking ale and reading letters. But his lady wife has spent a fortnight in full preparation. She’s ordered hunters into the Wolfswood for fresh game and brought up salted fish and cured sausages from the cellars. She’s tapping kegs, and changed the rushes, paid for fresh torches and called for bards and singers.

 

So he greets his visiting lords with a smile. He bids them to come into Winterfell’s Great Hall and sit with him, drink with him, speak with him. He reminds himself his bannermen haven’t seen him, their own lord, in moons either, so he pushes down his fatigue, his impatience, and offers them another round of ale.

 

All his petty complaints fade when the doors open and Catelyn sweeps into Great Hall. Her red hair has been twisted into a fetching style that glitters under the torchlight. She’s all smiles in the face of the applause greeting her. Only when she’s closing in on the dais does he recognize the gown she is wearing is made from cloth of gold he sent North early in his trip to King’s Landing.

 

Everyone else has noticed it, too. The ladies murmur to each other, delighted, jealous, as Catelyn takes her seat next to Ned at the high table. She’s been saving the gown for his return, he realizes.

 

He’s never been given to excessive affection, so she jumps a little, surprised, when he reaches over and takes her hand. “You look lovely,” he says.

 

It makes her blush prettily and flutter a hand over the ermine trimming her bodice. It’s what Ned wants, his wife being seen and appreciated. And if what his bannermen have been telling him for the last turn of the hour, that’s what she _deserves_.

 

His sister’s face flashes to mind. Dressed in the finest Myrish lace, sipping Arbor Gold, mother to the king’s son and yet utterly _unseen_.

 

He pushes to his feet. The guards at the end of the hall bang their tipped staffs on the flagstones and the chatter in the hall quiets.

 

Ned raises his horn of ale. He thanks his bannermen for traveling to greet him, the men who traveled with him to the South for joining his journey, King Rhaegar for hosting him with such generosity, the men and women of Winterfell for looking after his family in his absence. “And to my lady wife,” he finishes, turning on his heel and meeting her bright blue eyes, “for holding the North in my name, and doing a damn good job of it, if this sorry lot is worth its weight in ale.”

 

That sends up a raucous cheer from _that sorry lot_. The applause lingers until Catelyn stands beside Ned to drink to the toast.

 

“Hail Lady Stark!” someone shouts, and it’s repeated several times over.

 

Ned thumbs Catelyn’s elbow. “Hail Lady Stark,” he repeats. She casts him a delightedly confused look from the corner of her eye, which he meets by drinking to her health.

 

“Mayhaps you should travel South more often, my lord,” she remarks when they settle back into their chairs.

 

He shakes his head. “Overly warm down there,” he replies, and turns the other way to give Lady Karstark his ear.

 

Winterfell’s kitchens serve up simpler fare than those of the Red Keep. Ned welcomes it. All the fondant and sugary juices couldn’t cover up the political rot creeping through the Small Council or the King’s bittersweet attentions.

 

Elia’s chambers are in Maegor’s Holdfast, a befits her rank as Rhaegar’s wife and consort. Lyanna and Jon, for their part, reside in the Maidenvault, in chambers that had once belonged to Daena the Defiant.

_Fitting_ , Ned had japed when his once-rebellious little sister had told him. She’d joined his chuckle from the balcony overlooking the Blackwater where she was pouring wine for the both of them, pearls and rubies in her hair and skin bronzed from days in the saddle.

 

She’s living a life of leisure in King’s Landing, running through far more money as Rhaegar’s favored lady of court than their father could have ever secured for her north of the Neck. Not even Robert, that brash, doomed boy from Storm’s End, could have given her half the gowns she now wore a scant few times a year, much less a son with dragonsblood in his veins.

 

None of that carried any weight with Ned. As they finished a private tour of her wine cellar, which she told him was stocked with vintages from Sunspear to Asshai, and with each of her bejeweled fists clutching bottles from Old Town and the Rock, Ned had asked, _But you love each other, yes? And him the boy?_

 

The warmth of her smile faded, leaving behind only its sharpest edges. _Rhaegar loves himself, brother._

 

He wishes he could say she’s wrong. But he’s had six months to watch. To watch Rhaegar feast Queen Elia after Prince Doran sent a letter bemoaning new proposed imports on grapes from the Summer Isles, only to turn around and abandon her and spend an afternoon out riding with Lyanna the moment the ink was dry on a more favorable agreement.

 

To watch how the script flipped when Ned pressed him on grain reserves—how the king attended the Midsummer Feast with Lyanna on his arm, seating her in _queen’s throne_ while Elia Elia remained closed up with the prince and princess in Maegor’s.

 

To watch Aegon, Rhaenys, and Jon jockey for position at their father’s knees. To watch how the king gave them small competitions, with his attention as the reward, _encouraged_ their begging eyes and hearts, as if Westerosi dragons hadn’t ever slain their own nestmates before.

 

And—in a shocking realization for Ned himself—to watch how Rhaegar didn’t listen to the counsel of his wife, or even his mistress. Ned’s always known that ladies notice things their lord husbands might not. A particular turn of phrase another lord uses, the spread of a family’s children for fostering and marriages, calculating the coin a keep likely has in its coffers by observing what is served and not served, offered and not offered at hosted feasts …

 

But Rhaegar doesn’t seem to have recognized the value in letting his lovers walk among his vassals, as Ned has with Catelyn. Even now, with moons of conversation to catch up on and affection to share, he lets her go dance with Lord Manderly, then Lord Bolton.

 

It’s an easy decision, too. The musicians have been hired, the tune is springing, and Ned _hates_ dancing. He feels awkward, clumsy, barely a match for even little Sansa. Catelyn carries out his dancing duties with aplomb, and if she flatters and flirts with the men while she’s there, well, all for the better.

 

 _We make a good set, you and I_ , he’d told her not long after their wedding. _You the carrot and I the stick_. That had made her blush, as she was still struggling to embody the weighty mantle of Lady Stark.

 

She wears the title and all of its regalia tonight. Hosting a feast, directing the bards, instructing the children, gossiping with the ladies—his Riverlander wife is in her element, like the Tully trouts that return upstream to spawn. Society is just her nature. And like he does when he comes across all creatures in their natural domain, Ned watches and tries his best to learn.

 

All feasts must end, and this one does—but only well after midnight. The high lords stumble off to their rooms, the lesser lords already half passed-out on benches and rushes. Ned takes Cat’s arm and together they leave the Great Hall to climb the steps to the upper rooms of the keep.

 

She murmurs something about Ned being exhausted and retiring to her own chambers. But he shakes his head and tugs her through the door into the Lord’s chambers.

 

He kisses her gently, undresses her tenderly, loves her carefully. He mouths along every inch of her skin. When she sighs for _my lord,_ he reminds her to call him _Ned_ here, in his bed— _their_ bed. He waits until she’s shivering with need before bearing her back to the ticking, and holds out until she quakes with her release before giving over to the sweet bliss of the stars behind his eyes.

 

After their breaths have evened out and their skin has cooled, after they’ve cleaned themselves with damp rags, Ned rises and throws another log onto the fire. He’s not ready to sleep yet, nor is Catelyn it seems, for she leaves their warm mattress to pour wine for the both of them.

 

“Lyanna asked if Jon could foster with us,” Ned tells her, taking the proffered goblet. “I told her we would be happy to host him in Winterfell.”

 

Her forehead creases in a slight frown. “Would that be wise?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

It takes her a moment to gather her thoughts. She wraps herself in a blanket and settles herself in across from him. Her hair has tumbled down around her shoulders now. Their lovemaking has roughed the curls into a halo around her face, its features now settled into a thoughtful expression.

 

“We have so little room. To give Jon a place here would be to deny a bed to a son of one of your own bannermen. And—have you not thought of Robb?”

 

“Of course I have. It’ll be good for him to have a boy his own age to get into trouble with.”

 

Her mouth pulls to the side. She clearly disagrees, but she’s hesitating. Ned thinks of his sister, of Elia, cut off mid-sentence by a stubborn king, and waits.

 

“Jon is the king’s son, Lyanna’s son. But…he’s not a prince. Not even a lordling. I’d thought Rhaegar would have made him one by now, yet…” Catelyn sips her wine, avoiding her husband’s eyes. “If he were to foster here, I would worry that…he could be favored over Robb.”

“By whom?”

 

“The servants,” Catelyn offers. “The lords who visit. Even Sansa or Arya. He seems a sweet and gentle boy but he’s a bastard, Ned. And the girls are young enough that the … complexities of his birth could confuse them.”

 

Ned nods. It’s a reasonable argument. Very reasonable. Level-headed. Catelyn has always had practicality in spades. Her devotion to Robb as the first son of House Stark is clearer for her in this matter than for Ned. Cat, after all, doesn’t have the memory of a sister’s worried face lingering in her mind, begging, _promise me, Ned. Promise me you’ll consider it._

 

“I’m inclined to take Jon in. Bastard or no, he’s a Stark, and a Stark too far south. He should smell the frost at least once in his life,” he finally says. Cat’s face shutters just before he finishes: “But you’re right. There are complexities to consider. His birth, his rank. If we take Jon to foster, you shall choose his chambers, you shall choose which Northern sons to invite to foster alongside him, and you shall remind the household of our expectations for Robb as the next Lord Stark.”

 

She’s back to meeting his eyes now, peering at him from under her sooty lashes. Her blanket has slipped off her shoulder, and he’s inclined to take her to bed again.

 

“It could be good,” she says, sighs into her pillow later, when the fire has gone to embers and they’re rolled together under the blankets and skins of his bed. “Jon here. His brother will be king, and his cousin Warden in the North…”

 

Her voice trails off with a yawn. Behind her, Ned wraps his arm around her waist and tugs her a little tighter into his chest. “That’s my Cat.” He kisses her shoulder. “Always thinking ahead.”


End file.
